In 2012, a militant group wielding crude shovels and pickaxes damaged the ancient Sufi shrines in Timbuktu, Mali. The militant group, known as Ansar Dine (Defenders of Faith), attacked the city's ancient mosques and mausoleums associated with local Sufis, arguing that shrine worshipping is offensive to Shariah.

Before Nepal and Baltimore seized headlines, news that a CIA drone strike mistakenly killed an innocent American hostage in January momentarily energized our meager debate on drones. It is time for us, as Americans, to exercise our responsibility as citizens and take control of the debate.

Does American Sniper deserve special condemnation for its portrayals of Muslims? No, not special condemnation, particularly when you consider Hollywood's history. But the film's troubling depiction of Muslims deserves far more critical scrutiny than many journalists and film reviewers have been willing to give it.

Perhaps we should also ask a simple question about the rights of a woman in any given society: can she determine when she has children, and how many of them she will have? If she cannot, then what use are her supposed positions of honor or status? But come to think of it, shouldn't that right extend to women in the so-called developed first world, too?

Why did Sony decide to produce such a satirical, comedy about North Korea and its leader? That will be my perpetual question as stereotyping continues within the western world against Asians. This Orientalism and the concept that the East is weak, feminine, and seeking domination need to be eliminated from western mindset.

Halloween: the season of candy corn, pumpkins and culturally-insensitive costumes. Over the last few years, images of these costumes have spread through social media, sparking heated debates about cultural appropriation and how seemingly innocuous "fashion statements" can indeed hurt.

In a sense the movie is trying to solve a problem -- the destabilization of American masculine identity, a destabilization that was signaled by 9/11 and the Middle East mire but is also deeply tied to the rise of the Asian economies.

Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that Fox News does not have a history of questioning Christian scholars on their own bias in studying other faiths. What interests me is how our culture decides who gets to discuss and write about the Other.

In the course, aptly titled, "Historicizing 9/11," students at Connecticut College, a small liberal arts college in New London, have put forth their own history of 9/11 by making a documentary based on oral histories that they conducted of New London residents.

Last Saturday -- the same day the United States and Iran were having "constructive and useful" discussions on Iran's nuclear program in Istanbul -- the New York Times published a piece titled, "Seeking Nuclear Insight in Fog of the Ayatollah's Utterances."

With mosques functioning as the local centers of Islamic faith and the object of renewed Western suspicion, it is undeniable that mosques also help keep alive the memory of the divide of civilizations that once rent the world irreparably in two.

Even when Americans began to travel to Muslim lands, from the start they displayed a more diverse response to Islam and its mosques, which over the course of a century graduated from the crude to the reverent.

Compared to the European writers discovering the great mosques of Islam for the first time, the mention of mosques is more muted and void of romance to the Muslim secularists inured to them from birth.